Published 4:00 am, Thursday, March 29, 2012

According to a Newsday story that appeared Wednesday, the 23-year-old Lin met the fired writer of an inflammatory ESPN headline for lunch Tuesday. The meeting had originally been arranged after someone in Lin's family sent an e-mail to the writer, Anthony Federico, who told Newsday's Anthony Rieber about the lunch.

To recap: A little over a month ago, Federico topped a story about a turnover binge by the Knicks guard by using a too-common idiom that included a word considered a slur against Asian Americans.

Federico was promptly fired. Subsequently, he apologized and said via Twitter and the New York Daily News that he had used the phrase at least 100 other times and "I wrote the headline in reference to the tone of the column and not to Jeremy Lin's race. It was a lapse in judgment and not a racist pun. It was an awful editorial omission ... I owe an apology to Jeremy Lin and all people offended. I am truly sorry."

The Palo Alto High graduate responded to the furor over the headline with: "You have to learn to forgive."

That comment alone was pretty powerful. The follow-through was world-class.

Lin did not comment on the report. Federico, 28, told Newsday that he was grateful that Lin had worked to find time for the lunch, and that he still wanted to meet even after the controversy had faded.

The two talked for about an hour, he said, spending only about three minutes on the topic of the headline.

"We talked more about matters of faith (and) reconciliation," Federico told the paper. "We talked about our shared Christian values and what we're both trying do with this situation."

They've already done more than most people caught in a media scuffle, going well beyond the hackneyed version of "putting this behind us."

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